1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an inkjet printer, and more particularly, to an inkjet printer having a plurality of carriers in which a cartridge is arbitrarily mounted, and to a method of recognizing the cartridge.
2. Description of the Related Art
An inkjet printer prints desired images by ejecting ink through fine nozzles of a print head. The inkjet printer uses a print cartridge including the print head and the ink. In the inkjet printer, information data for printing the images is transferred to the print cartridge through a portion of the print cartridge, wherein the print cartridge contacts a cartridge shaft along which the print cartridge is moved.
The inkjet printer may be classified into one of a thermal transfer type and a piezoelectric device type according to a method of ejecting the ink onto a sheet of print paper. In any type of the inkjet printer, since the print head of a thin film is used, each of ink droplets can be rapidly ejected from respective nozzles at a fast printing speed. Also, in the case of the thermal transfer type, since there are no moving parts, and since a switching resistor exists, reliability of the inkjet printer can be improved. Also, since, unlike a dot printer, the inkjet printer ejects the ink without contacting the sheet of the print paper, noise is decreased during printing the images on the sheet. Further, since a fan or a large power supply is not needed, a volume of the inkjet printer is reduced and a manufacturing cost thereof is lowered.
In spite of the above advantages, a conventional inkjet printer, however, has the following disadvantages.
That is, in the conventional inkjet printer, both a cartridge containing black ink (hereinafter, referred to as a black cartridge) for a black and white printing function and a cartridge containing color ink (hereinafter, referred to as a color cartridge) for a color printing function are designated to respective predetermined positions of the print cartridge. Accordingly, a user should recognize where the black cartridge and the color cartridge should be mounted in the inkjet printer to properly use the inkjet printer. It is inconvenient for the user to accurately mount the black cartridge or the color cartridge in the respective predetermined positions. Also, although a higher speed printing is possible by changing a normal print mode to a higher speed print mode, resolution is lowered and print quality deteriorates.